https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/27/bidens-middle-east-policies-place-a-premium-on-collaboration/

Partnerships with allies – even if to pursue different motives – plays a central role in US policy to the region.

In a speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington last week, White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk outlined an emerging “Biden doctrine” that “guides US engagement” in the Middle East. Any declaration which is that sweeping deserves to be carefully unpacked.

Mr McGurk outlined “five declaratory principles,” effectively restating much of what was already laid out in the National Security Strategy issued in October 2022. These five principles are partnerships, deterrence, diplomacy, integration and US values.

Both the McGurk speech and the NSS begin with partnerships, evidently to emphasise the centrality of collaboration for the Biden doctrine in the Middle East.

The Ukraine war has helped the Biden administration and most serious strategic thinkers in Washington to reconsider the strategic importance of Southwest Asia to US foreign policy. Energy exports from the Gulf region and the three key waterways, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Arabian Gulf, plus their three key chokepoints, the Suez Canal, Bab Al Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz, are unmistakably central to any global regime of stability, security and prosperity.

Washington’s role as the guarantor of maritime security and unimpeded international access to these arteries that carry so much of the lifeblood of the global economy is now viewed as a key asset for imperatives ranging from maintaining what is left of the beleaguered rules-based global order to great power competition with China.

The Biden administration deserves credit for recognising, particularly after the invasion of Ukraine, not only the centrality of this region to the US global posture but also the centrality of local partners in realising such security and stability. The equation drawing the US close to its Gulf Arab and other Middle Eastern partners is no longer anything resembling “oil for security” – if, indeed, it ever was that. Instead, on both sides, it is increasingly viewed as a partnership necessary to achieve mutual goals even if they are being pursued for different reasons. That is a lot more like the US relationship with its Nato partners, Japan or South Korea.

Therefore, while the 1980 Carter Doctrine held that the US would use all means to prevent any outside force to gain control of the Arabian Gulf region, the Biden doctrine pledges that the US will “make sure those countries can defend themselves against foreign threats,” and “will not allow foreign or regional powers to jeopardise freedom of navigation through the Middle East’s waterways.” The greater shift towards burden sharing and mutuality is evident, even though the Biden administration maintains it “will not tolerate efforts by any country to dominate another – or the region – through military buildups, incursions or threats.”

Co-operation such as the maritime surveillance and security projects being overseen by the US Navy’s Task Force 59, which are heavily reliant on regional partners, recognise that Gulf Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have emerged as mid-level regional, and to some extent international, powers. This new emphasis on partnerships provides Washington’s Middle East allies ample scope to, for example, develop much greater ties with China without threatening the overarching strategic relationship with the US, as long as those measures don’t provide Beijing with an undue strategic foothold in the region.

Moreover, the emphasis on partnerships promotes closer bilateral and multilateral relations among traditional US partners, most obviously the Abraham Accords between a number of Arab countries and Israel.

Mr McGurk was quick to add deterrence to the list and left no doubt this primarily concerns Iran. With nuclear talks having broken down, Washington has been quietly developing a new regime of containment against Tehran that seeks to restrain its destructive regional activities and prepare for any Iranian sprint towards nuclear weapons construction.

Yet he emphasised the administration’s commitment to diplomacy, which is serious. However, Mr McGurk and many other key officials, including the president, participated in the two Obama administrations and appeared to have learnt key lessons about the limitations of how much American goodwill can achieve in the face of implacable opposition.

The fourth principle is integration, which may be the biggest innovation of Mr Biden’s Middle East approach. Mr McGurk claimed the US is at last developing “an integrated air and maritime defence architecture in the region.” Regarding air and missile defences, this crucial goal appears to remain largely aspirational, though some limited progress is being made. But the administration is right to believe that such a system is crucial to the national security of many of its regional partners, not least Gulf Arab countries. More integrated regional infrastructure is surely the best way to give the current climate of de-escalation in the Middle East more staying power by providing incentives to avoid conflict and confrontation.

The fifth principle of values rightly comes last. It is not that the US does not want, or even try, to promote its values. But major efforts to emphasise that, whether by force when the George W Bush administration invaded Iraq or maladroit efforts by the Barack Obama administration to create a new dynamic between the US and the Arab and Muslim worlds, ended up looking phony and misguided, respectively, and in both cases wholly ineffectual.

The Biden administration is wise not to over-promise on promoting values it cannot realise in practice, while reiterating that Washington does, in fact, believe what it preaches. Indeed, the Biden doctrine crucially recognises several key realities: the centrality of partnerships to achieving plausible and necessary goals in the region; traditional partners emerging as regional actors in their own right in the context of a developing multipolar reality; and that diplomacy and integration provide the greatest opportunity for advancing security and stability.

The emphasis on partnerships, integration, and diplomacy promote burden sharing and in time should allow the US to right-size its regional force posture and do more with less. Much of the current configuration is a legacy of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It doesn’t correspond to most present-day missions and threats and appears more of a relic of a bygone era.

The “Biden doctrine” may not be an innovation or even much of a doctrine. But it is serious and sound. That is probably as much as anyone can hope for. Given the fate of more ambitious Middle East policy agendas by recent administrations, less is decidedly more.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/21/how-the-us-right-got-trapped-in-lies-about-the-2020-election/

Republican politicians feared their voters in exactly the same way Fox feared its viewers with both ending up beholden to preposterous falsehoods.

Since the rise of Donald Trump, there has been a mystery about how and why so many otherwise respectable, seemingly intelligent and well-informed, Republicans could embrace his preposterous fabrications. A new trove of emails reflecting top-level behind-the-scenes conversations at Fox News Channel, the highest-rated US public affairs network, illustrates in vivid and deeply disturbing detail the process that produces a deliberate embrace of falsehood over basic and objectively verifiable truth. Now we know.

The lessons go far beyond Fox. It is an excellent roadmap of the process through which most Republican leaders refused to challenge the worst of these falsehoods, especially the “big lie” that the 2020 election was somehow “stolen” from Mr Trump. The cynicism and corrupted groupthink at Fox News has reflected in Congress and state houses around the country. It has left most of the US right detached from reality and beholden to a preposterous fairytale that is highly damaging to the country and corrosive to democracy.

The emails exposing the systematic dishonesty at Fox were obtained by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the voting machines used in much of the country. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation because of the barrage of false accusations made by guests and hosts on the company’s flagship programmes. To this day, Fox’s most significant shows – Fox and Friends in the morning and the evening primetime troika of Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson – routinely promote a wide range of conspiracy theories, often targeting Dominion, purporting to explain that Mr Trump won the election.

But what the company, which has probably become nonviable because of this crude defamation, has already achieved through its $1.6 billion lawsuit is: irrefutably establishing that the Fox hosts and officials knew perfectly well that such claims were ridiculous and privately disparaged many of the regular guests as lying. But at the same time, they insisted that the network must “respect” the audience by telling it what it wants to hear rather than what the organisation knows full well to be true. That is much closer to disdain than respect.

Hosts and guests on the network routinely claimed that Dominion was founded or controlled by Venezuela and Cuba, and that its machines could be “hacked” and “rigged” to “flip” vast numbers of votes from Mr Trump to US President Joe Biden. None of this is true, or even possible.

In the White House then-attorney general William Barr, among many other officials, strongly warned Mr Trump these claims are outlandish. He later testified that he worried that, because he seemed to take such interest in them, the former president was losing touch with reality.

Even more significant, though, are the insights into why a self-described “news” network would base so much of its programming on incendiary untruths. The emails demonstrate that the Fox News anchors and executives were fixated on ratings (and thus advertising revenue), and virtually panicked when large chunks of the Trump-adoring fan base began turning the channel after it correctly predicted Mr Biden’s victory in Arizona.

As Fox’s ratings dropped and its tiny but even more extreme and Trump-obsessed competitors, Newsmax and One American News, rose, emails between the network’s stars and executives show they quickly concluded that their all-important audience was not interested in verifiable truth, but was actively seeking comforting, reassuring and reinforcing falsehoods, especially denying or at least casting doubt on the fact that Mr Biden soundly defeated Mr Trump.

And they noted that the more they focused on conspiracy theories about the election, the more their audience returned to them. So, they decided to provide the audience what they crave, no matter how absurd. It is the antithesis of news and a quintessence of propaganda.

Moreover, the emails demonstrate that Fox News’s movers and shakers were actually afraid of their audience. And undoubtedly the same calculation was obvious to Republican officials and candidates in Congress and state houses around the country. A few may be fanatical, conspiratorial or just plain gullible to believe such absurdities. How could Mr Biden wrongly and so many Republicans rightly be elected on the same ballots if they were fraudulent? Why would Democrats cheat to secure the White House but not give themselves a majority in the Senate? In the main, they appear to have followed the same logic about their voters as Fox officials did about their viewers.

Some Republican voters believe the “stolen election” mythology because they heard it from Mr Trump, from Fox News and the others, and from their own elected officials (who, at the very least, did not try to disabuse them of this delusion). Mr Trump and his allies moved quickly to make election denial a litmus test to distinguish “real Republicans” from “Republicans in name only” (the detested “Rinos”). And they demonstrated during the midterm election that they can still decide most Republican primaries although, with a few scattered and rare exceptions, purveyors of the big lie lost in the general elections.

Now it has become a self-reinforcing mythology of totemic proportions. Over the weekend, Republican voters in Michigan – where Democrats secured complete control of the state for the first time in many decades in the midterms – doubled down on the outlandish by selecting Kristina Karamo, one of the US’s most vociferous election deniers to be their state party leader. She defeated a slightly less enthusiastic election denier who was endorsed by Mr Trump and the party leadership.

Allowing for scatterings of oddballs and conspiracy theorists, there is no doubt that Republican officials and leaders followed the same path into absolute dishonesty that the Dominion lawsuit email trove demonstrates Fox leaders did.

Most alarming is the spread and casual acceptance of a complete fabrication. It is one of the surest signs of the emergence of authoritarian political systems whether of the left or the right. But the Fox email trove demonstrates exactly how and why the US political right has become a solar system guided by one gigantic lie and orbited by countless smaller ones. That’s a catastrophe not just for the Republican Party, but for the whole country.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/14/how-to-honour-close-friends-after-their-death/

Interacting with Colin, Blake and Pratip illuminated the intersection of the personal and political registers.

Over the past 12 months, I lost three friends, each of whom had a profound impact on my life, thinking and career. But behind my grief and survivor’s guilt I think I can discern some valuable lessons about what one can learn from the most interesting people we meet and how crucial it is to look past superficial foibles. I owe each one of them a considerable debt of gratitude.

The first loss was hardly unexpected. On April 25, 2022, Colin Cavell passed away from complications of diabetes. He was a close friend in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and proved especially loyal and warmhearted. I found Colin fascinating immediately because in the early 1990s he already seemed a figure from the mythic past, almost like seeing a pterodactyl swoop by, as he was a committed member of the Communist Party USA. Until I met him, I thought that organisation was long gone.

He appeared a walking contradiction. Here was an all-American guy oozing the Cajun charm and gentility of his native Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With his moustache, boots, overcoat and hat, he might’ve been a stagecoach driver out of another mythic past. Yet he was the proud owner of the collected works of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao and even Stalin.

No one worked harder to rename the UMass library after the great African-American scholar WEB Du Bois. My friends and I successfully nominated him for the UMass Chancellor’s Award for Multiculturalism in 1996. When accepting the award, however, he made the assembled dignitaries sit through an endless Leninist harangue worthy of Fidel Castro. It was simultaneously hilarious, excruciating and tedious.

Colin went on to teach at the University of Bahrain’s American Studies Center from 2002-2011. In October 2008, he arranged for me to be the keynote speaker at the Center’s 10th anniversary. Neither the end of the Cold War nor the many decades following the collapse of the USSR shook his baffling Marxist-Leninist convictions. He never budged an inch.

Since Colin’s health had been deteriorating for several years, his death was saddening but unsurprising. But I was utterly shocked when Blake Hounshell died by suicide by jumping off of the Taft Bridge in Washington DC on January 10. He was just 44, and among the most talented American journalists of his generation. He was editor of the New York Times‘ ‘On Politics’ newsletter, but I had gotten to know him earlier as managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Blake spent several years in Egypt studying Arabic and working at the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies. As Blake and his mentor, Susan Glasser, were brilliantly reinventing Foreign Policy, I had numerous lunches with him. One of them gave rise to a short and provocative article in June 2012, asking whether the then-ongoing Arab uprisings were worth it – a question that eventually became far more widespread.

Blake was a rare American journalist with a deep understanding of the Arab world and a reliable voice of reason on the Middle East. His tragic death is a loss not just for his family and friends, colleagues and readers, but also for better understanding of the Arab world in the US.

On January 26 came the sudden and shocking passing of Pratip Dastidar. He was definitely the most intelligent person in my own age cohort I ever met (we were exactly the same age), and had a tremendous influence on my life and career. 

We became extremely close in 1990, during the buildup to the first Gulf War, in campus activism and journalism at UMass. We worked closely together at the Third World affairs page in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian newspaper and the “Voices of the Third World” programme on WMUA radio station originally hosted by another close friend, Madanmohan Rao, and later by me.

It wasn’t Pratip’s ideology or political orientation that struck me so deeply. Indeed, his specific views were somewhat ephemeral. He could flip from what seemed to be the far-left to what most would consider the ultra-right without batting an eyelid, although his Indian nationalism and pro-Palestinian commitment remained consistent. His pronouncements often seemed calculated to produce an effect more than stake out a passionately-held claim.

However, watching him analyze and almost clinically dissect another person, an event, or a development was a masterful seminar. He had an uncanny ability to size up his audience, and especially his opponent, no matter how small or large the group and the topic at hand, identify the weak spot and strike at the jugular with the sudden speed of a king cobra. He was a master of psychology, always probing for the emotional rather than the logical or factual vulnerability on the other side. I watched him regularly stun practiced and well-prepared interlocutors into dumbstruck silence and, on many occasions, obnoxious opponents into tears.

Yet, beneath the (sometimes sadistic) interpersonal ferocity and ideological malleability lay a wealth of invaluable insights for those who could withstand the tempest. Like another of my closest friends, the late, great contrarian Christopher Hitchens, Pratip wasn’t always right. Indeed, in my view both of them were often wrong. But their analytical prowess and rhetorical genius turned long, late-night conversations into methodological and stylistic master classes.

Pratip was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and died just a few weeks later. With him goes a pile of books I am sure he was going to write, and that I am furious I will never get to read. We seriously discussed co-authoring a volume on the changing nature of work, productivity and human fulfilment.

Interacting with Colin, Blake and Pratip illuminated the intersection of the personal and political registers.

Colin’s ideological passion made his seeming contradictions all the more fascinating. Blake was the first editor to bring out the best in me as a writer and translate conversations into publications.

Many of my formative political experiences were shared with Pratip. Working with him trained me to analyse a political problem and act with effect, but also what to avoid. He often said our campus activism taught us almost everything we needed to know for our later life and careers. He was right, and working with him was a major part of that invaluable extracurricular training.

Losing friends who were also our teachers is exceedingly painful. The best I can do going forward is to honour their legacy through writing that faithfully reflects these lessons.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/01/the-us-is-right-to-show-concern-for-the-situation-in-palestine-israel-but-whos-listening/

Many Jewish and other Americans are increasingly unable to ignore the reality of permanent occupation.

In the occupied Palestinian territories – especially East Jerusalem and the West Bank – 2023 is shaping up to be a volatile year. As a consequence, the normally sacrosanct US-Israeli relationship is headed into unusually choppy waters. The current flare-up of deadly violence will be hard to contain and the real question is, how bad will things get?

Last year was the most violent one in the West Bank since 2005, when the UN began keeping records of Palestinians killed there by Israeli occupation forces. Among the victims was the noted American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who had been infuriating Israeli authorities for decades with her coverage of the occupation.

Despite a simmering insurgency among largely unaffiliated armed Palestinian youth gangs such as the “Lion’s Den”, which emerged in response to routine Israeli attacks, especially night raids into supposedly autonomous Palestinian towns, relations between the US and Israel remained largely unaffected. Both US President Joe Biden and the Israeli coalition government led by former prime minister Naftali Bennett had every interest in supporting each other by not making waves in the bilateral relationship.

Lurking in the background was the mutually feared and loathed right-wing Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. In December, Mr Netanyahu pieced together the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history, bringing to power religious and nationalist extremists who have heretofore been considered anathema even by the Israeli far right.

Some of these figures, such as the new minister of national security,Itamar Ben-Gvir, appeared delighted by the sudden opportunity to throw petrol on the smouldering embers. Within days of his appointment, he made an official visit to the highly volatile Haram Al Sharif compound, which seemed modelled on Ariel Sharon’s similar intrusion in 2000 that sparked the second intifada.

That came just a few weeks after the Oslo peace process hit a dead end at the ill-fated and ill-conceived Camp David summit in July 2000. And since the equally ill-advised and quixotic quest for a meaningful Israeli settlement freeze during Barack Obama’s first term as US president, even the simulation of negotiations has been dropped.

Instead, for the past 23 years, the Israeli political scene has been moving relentlessly away from any pretence of a commitment to a two-state solution and instead towards annexation, possibly combined with some level of expulsion of Palestinians from parts of the West Bank to be officially merged with Israel.

Mr Netanyahu’s new government says that it is preparing to transfer key governance powers in the occupied territories from the occupation Civil Administration to new ultra-right-wing Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich. The Israeli government’s own senior legal advisers have warned that much of the rest of the world, including the International Court of Justice, would be likely to view such a step as de facto annexation – and rightly so.

While Israeli politics have been moving steadily towards annexation, Palestinian politics are just dead in the water. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Palestinian Authority gambled everything on negotiating a two-state solution with the Israelis, who have apparently lost any inclination to move in that direction. They have yet to identify an alternative. And Hamas, which rules Gaza, has no answer other than the catastrophic and corrupt extremist misrule on full and horrifying display in the Palestinian enclave.

Yet a new generation of Palestinians that lacks any memory of how damaging and self-defeating the second intifada was and has grown up without any framework of hope for citizenship – in whatever country – and basic human rights, let alone self-determination, finally appears to be taking the initiative. Believing they have nothing to lose and unmoored from attachment to established and discredited political movements, both secular and extremist from the PLO to Hamas and even Palestinian Islamic Jihad, these angry and desperate young men are playing their gruesome roles in a tragedy of grim inevitability.

Human beings, no matter their ethnicity, culture or religion, simply will not accept a long-term and open-ended future of total subordination to another people, especially in their own land and in relatively equal numbers. The violent relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is hard-wired and structural. A reversal of this essential relationship of dominance and subordination between the two identity groups would produce roughly the same behaviours on both sides.

The deepest tragedy is that the Israeli extreme right seems to be counting on Palestinian rage and desperation to provide them with the opportunity to go as far as they can in their twin goals of annexation and expulsion. Not only will Israel impose the usual collective punishments of home demolitions and mass lockdowns following the recent violent Palestinian attacks (though never in response to Jewish ones), but extremist cabinet ministers have also demanded official recognition for a set of unauthorised settlement outposts “in retaliation” for attacks against Israelis.

Never mind that there is no logical connection whatsoever between any rational response to violence and recognising wildcat settlements. It is just an excuse. Unfortunately, the enraged Palestinian youths involved are not likely to reflect on what else they could provide the rationalisation for as reciprocal violence intensifies.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who visited the region this week, knows that he and Mr Biden have little leverage over Mr Netanyahu, especially since they seem to be oddly disinclined to so much as fortnightly acknowledge that Palestinians are suffering under a military occupation. The Israeli Prime Minister, in turn, has little leverage over his more radical cabinet colleagues. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has, if anything, even less leverage over the youths driving the Palestinian side of the cycle of violence that Israeli extremists are counting on.

The US is right to show concern, but neither side is really listening. The past 10 years suggest that, as things stand, Israel can be slowed, but not deterred, from creeping steadily towards annexation, and always intensifying the status quo of systematic, formalised inequality between Jews and Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Many Jewish and other Americans, especially Democrats, are increasingly unable to support or ignore this reality, especially since it is coupled with efforts by fundamentalists in Israel to exclude many Jewish Americans from the Israeli or even Jewish fold on denominational or ancestral grounds.

Republicans, driven by apocalyptic evangelical Christians, may not care, but as long as the US has a Democratic administration and Israel has a fundamentalist, racist and annexationist government, the traditionally inviolable “special relationship” will be imperilled.

Mr Netanyahu, Mr Biden and Mr Blinken will strive to paper over this growing schism, but it’s likely to grow considerably wider by the end of this dangerous year.